Paint Schoodic

Join us on the American Eagle in June or in Acadia National Park in August. Click here for more information.

Monday, September 15, 2014

So you can't draw a straight line, redux.

Martha's first painting. And for those who know us too well, let me say up front that that's not a whisky bottle.

You may remember my friend Amy telling me last summer that
she couldn’t draw a straight line, and me challenging
her to let me teach
her. Her sister Martha was in town this week, and she asked me if she could
come to my painting class on Saturday.

Like Amy, Martha has a doctorate from a prestigious American
university. She also recently went back and got an MS in landmark preservation
from an art school. However, the last time Martha actually took a hands-on art
class was when she was a freshman at Brighton High School. (By my calculations,
that must have been at least twenty years ago.)

Her sketch for the same.

Here is her drawing, and here is her painting—both done in a single three-hour class.

“This is some kind of parlor trick,” my daughter Laura told
me afterward. “You take people who ‘can’t do art’ and in three hours prove to
them that they can.”

Well, duh, honey. Most people believe the lie that art is magic,
rather than craft. And the methodology for teaching
drawing and painting has become impossibly corrupted in modern America (with a few notable exceptions).

Yes, I'm repeating myself here, but I'll continue to do so as long as people believe the lie that they can't draw.

If you’re interested, there is more information on my fall
classes here.